The Final Days of the Longest War

At a dusty Marine Corps forward operating base in southern Afghanistan in 2011, in transit to embed with a platoon at a small, remote outpost, I met a Russian journalist who was dressed more for happy hour than combat: stylish slim jeans, loafers, and a crisp button-down shirt. He'd been to the same area once before, in the mid-1980s, as a lieutenant with the Russian special forces fighting the mujahideen.

His war long over, he'd come to see how the next contestant was faring. He walked around the Marine base with a wry smile that said, How's this working out for you? The Marine Corps may pride itself on getting by with less, but even the Marines were far better resourced than the Russians. Such choices at mealtime! Not to mention the technology and armor and weaponry. But U. S. forces were too soft in their fighting, he suggested. When his men took sniper fire, they called in artillery strikes on a one-kilometer-square grid, collateral damage be damned.

The U. S. military had traded that heavy-handedness — deemed battle-winning but war-losing — for a full embrace of counterinsurgency. The Marines I'd be patrolling with spent far more time cajoling Afghans than shooting them, based on hard lessons learned over a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. And they'd had some real success, tamping down violence and building up local security forces. And maybe those successes will endure. But either way, next year the Americans will be gone, just as the Russian soldier-turned-journalist and his comrades had left a quarter century earlier.

Will Afghanistan be better without us? Worse? And who cares, anyway? Not the American people, as long as they're told they're being kept safe from terrorism.

So what are we left with as America prepares its 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan, marking an end to combat that started less than a month after the September 11 attacks? Here's one legacy: war made easier, with many duties outsourced to private contractors, and armed drones lessening the risk for pilots and ground troops — and vastly lowering America's threshold for using deadly force around the world. The first armed-drone strike hit suspected terrorist leaders in Afghanistan in 2001. We've since added Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya. Who's next?

Now we can conduct wars with it barely feeling like a war at all, at least for those Americans who don't ship out, which — statistically speaking — is everybody.

Fewer than three million Americans have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, less than 1 percent of the U. S. population. This is good, of course, that we aren't fighting wars that need more people, but one effect is clear: further separation between the military and an American public that was asked to give nothing for these wars, not even some extra tax money to pay for them.

Meanwhile, there will be men and women — some of that 1 percent — trying to make sense of where they've been, what they've been doing, and the world they've come home to.

Several years ago, I spent time with an Army infantry platoon at an outpost on a mountainside along the Pakistan border. A year later, American forces destroyed the outpost and withdrew from the area, essentially ceding the territory back to the insurgents. I asked one of the soldiers I'd been with what he thought of that. What was that for? he wondered. That was a year of our lives.

I thought my part of the Long War — as an infantryman in Iraq — unnecessary, and the preceding sales job to the American people dishonest. But I hoped to someday look back and see it was all worthwhile, because otherwise it would be too painful, too disheartening, to think about sacrifices made, about the friends wounded and killed. I'm still waiting for that verdict.

I left the Army in 2005, after two Iraq deployments, but I stayed connected to the war as a journalist and made several reporting trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. With the wars ongoing, I hadn't felt I was part of a distinct generation, the way I thought about the World War II generation or the Vietnam generation of veterans down at the VFW as I was growing up. But that's us now. Our wars will be over. Everything will be past tense.

The younger troops fighting in Afghanistan right now were seven years old when American boots hit the ground in 2001. They've known nothing but their country at war. Now they represent a generation, a moment in America as America moves on.

The drone strikes will continue, as will secretive raids and small, hot flashes of combat, but will there ever be another war that requires so many bodies for the same effect?

And that's another legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe mine will be America's last generation of war veterans.

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